Looking to the Past: Soma, Magical Thinking and the Implications of the New Genetics Commentary on Stowe et al., Journal on Developmental Disabilities, 13(2), 2007

(this issue) are to be commended for their wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion of many key ethical, social, and politico-legal issues arising out of contemporary work on the sequencing of the human genome and the associated technological and therapeutic innovations that are promised (threatened?) by it. For those of us outside of the United States, much of their discussion of the legal implications can be of little immediate practical relevance- although, it is to be hoped that legislators in Australasia may learn from the experience of the North American jurisdictions discussed. This is not in any way a criticism of their paper, because clearly the issues of individual privacy, confidentiality of genetic data, personal autonomy, and so on transcend legislatures. These issues are not those to which I wish to respond, however. Here I would simply like to add a further voice to their call for public debate about the issues raised by the Human Genome Project (HGP) and associated technologies (henceforth HGP for short) to be explicitly informed by a